A structural equation modeling analysis of fairness heuristic theory

Prior research on fairness heuristic theory of organizational justice has shown that procedural information is used when distributive information is lacking. This study extends consideration of fairness heuristic in two ways: By testing fairness heuristic effects across four different combinations of procedural and distributive justice; and by testing an ambiguous distributive outcome. Structural equation modeling is used to measure the directionality of procedural and distributive justice effects. Procedural justice is of interest to organizations because of its impact on important organizational outcomes. These include: performance (Ball, Trevino & Sims, 1995; Gilliland, 1994; Konovsky & Cropanzano, 1991; Welbourne Balkin & Gomez-Mejia, 1995), organizational commitment (Brockner, 1992; Konovsky & Cropanzano, 1991; Schaubroeck May & Brown 1994), job satisfaction (Schaubroeck et al, 1994), organizational citizenship behavior (Ball et al, 1995), commitment to organizational decisions (Greenberg, 1994; Korsgaard, Schweiger & Sapienza, 1995; Lind, Kulik, Ambrose & de Vera Park, 1993), turnover intentions (Schaubroeck et al, 1994, Olson-Buchanan, 1996), theft (Greenberg, 1990, 1993), and retaliation against organizations (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). Organizational systems that have been linked to procedural justice include: Employee discipline (Cole & Latham, 1997), inter-group conflict (Huo, Smith, Tyler & Lind, 1996), institutional racism (Jeanquart-Barone, 1996), performance appraisal (Barclay & Harland, 1995), pay for performance (St. Onge, 2000), and employee benefits (Tremblay, Sire & Balkin, 2000). There are some conditions when procedural justice is more salient than others. Fairness heuristic theory provides an explanation for these conditions.